Not all the traffic coming down from North Beach to SoMA last Friday night had to stop – lots of cars were directed straight on through. But those that weren’t had to pull over to the right for a brief convo with a peace officer of some stripe.

Like the driver of this Mercedes E350, for example. Don’t think she was a drunkie, but she had some sort of registration hassle it appeared (and that’s not all that uncommon in this age of shut-down, furloughed DMVs.) Stop sign holder graciously provided by PG&E:

Oh well. But let’s say you fail your field sobriety test on Montgomery Street. This is what’s in store for you – a trip into the huge mobile command post parked on the same block. No waiting:

Most people didn’t seem to mind, and the way that Montgomery is set up with three-way lights (to let the throngs of imagined evening-hour financial district peds scramble across Montgomery any which way they want) being picked to be a part of the checkpoint might not actually have slowed the journeys to the nearest freeway onramp: